This chapter discusses the theatrical practices of the surrealist artist Leonor Fini (1907–1996) in relation to strategies of self-protection and empowerment through self-fashioning and affect on audiences. Fini theatrically staged and lived her paintings through continuously dressing-up and recreating herself in different roles as a way to experiment with what she called her own multiplicity and to liberate herself from constrictions as a woman/artist in a male dominated art world. Through spectacular self-designed costumes, masks and different ways of self-stylisation, displayed in public performances at balls or social events and in photographic portraits taken by prominent art and fashion photographers, Fini indulged in processes of self-transformation and transgression. “Becoming” animals, hybrid creatures, sorceresses and others, she staged herself as a powerful woman and artist subverting conventional gender roles and the notion of fixed identities. Interpreted through theories in theatre and performance studies as well as notions of the sublime and becoming, the case of Leonor Fini is highly relevant for discussing the interaction of performance and performativity and the merging of artistic creation and self-creation in the self-fashioning of a woman artist that performs as a powerful, sometimes terrifying subject through creating herself as a sublimely beautiful object.

In the first comprehensive study of the interactions between fashion, performance and performativity, a group of international experts explore fashion as the ideal 'complex space' – or, in other words, the ideal space where performance and performativity come together, according to the works of seminal theorists Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Andrew Parker.

Bringing together western and non-western, historical and contemporary case studies and theories, the book explores the magazines, photography, exhibitions, global colonial divides, digital media, and more, which have become key markers of the fashion industry as we know it today.

Using existing literature as a springboard and incorporating perspectives from fashion studies, art history, media studies and gender studies, as well as from artists and practitioners, Fashion, Performance & Performativity is an innovative and essential work for students, scholars and practitioners across multiple disciplines.

A Cultural History of the Avant-Garde in the Nordic Countries 1925-1950 is the first publication to deal with the avant-garde in the Nordic countries in this period. The essays cover a wide range of avant-garde manifestations: literature, visual arts, theatre, architecture and design, film, radio, body culture and magazines. It is the first major historical work to consider the Nordic avant-garde in a transnational perspective that includes all the arts and to discuss the role of the avant-garde not only within the aesthetic field but in a broader cultural and political context: the pre-war and wartime responses to international developments, the new cultural institutions, sexual politics, the impact of refugees and the new start after the war.

Art and fashion have long gone hand in hand, but it was during the modernist period that fashion first gained equal value to – and took on the same aesthetic ideals as – painting, film, photography, dance, and literature. Combining high and low art forms, modernism turned fashion designers into artists and vice versa.

Bringing together internationally renowned scholars across a range of disciplines, this vibrant volume explores the history and significance of the relationship between modernism and fashion and examines how the intimate connection between these fields remains evident today, with contemporary designers relating their work to art and artists problematizing fashion in their works.

With chapters on a variety topics ranging from Russian constructionism and clothing to tango and fashion in the early 20th century, Fashion and Modernism is essential reading for students and scholars of fashion, dress history, and art history alike.